The Kind of Person Who Throws Popcorn at You

Most people bore me within five minutes. Not aggressively—just that slow fade behind the eyes when someone starts talking about their neighborhood or their hair and I realize there’s nothing there I haven’t heard before. The women I tend to meet at parties don’t improve the odds. Attractive enough to pull your attention across a room, says nothing interesting once you’re standing next to each other, keeps talking anyway. At that point I’m either calculating the distance to the nearest window or hoping they have genuinely exceptional oral skills, because one of those two things might save the evening.

Sandra is not like that. She crashed into my life with a mischievous smile and a habit of saying genuinely perverted things at exactly the right moment, and I was done for before I understood what was happening. She’s quick in both senses—verbally sharp, physically present, the kind of wit that doesn’t announce itself before landing. At the Illustrative art fair she talked the house photographer into divulging things about a German actress’s private life that he absolutely should not have shared. In the cinema she throws popcorn at me. Not meanly. Accurately.

I’m keeping her in the basement, obviously. That’s where the good ones end up. We feed her chocolate and caramelized marshmallows and she seems content.

She also shoots Berlin with a small digicam and the results are genuinely good—the kind of city photography that doesn’t try to make things look better than they are, just watches. I’m not objective about this. But I’m not pretending to be, either.